Christmas concerts come all too rarely for merry, carol-singing children. Parents, looking back nostalgically to other Christmases, strung behind like footprints in the snow, wonder where the years between have disappeared. For Christmas, time of rejoicing and merriment, is also a time for remembering -- especially memories of schooldays recalled by Christmas choirs. Already, Shirley McKinnon, above, is remembering. Last yuletide, she helped prepare the Christmas concert in one of Canada's dwindling one-roomed schools. Now, she rides to a new central elementary school, one of hundreds built across Ontario in the past few years, cutting single-room schools by thirty per cent. Like millions of Canadians since the nation's humble beginnings, Shirley will remember in later years the special spirit packed tight within a rural school. She will think back to Christmas concert time when the school, in a stage setting of freshly-fallen snow, assumed a magical atmosphere of festivity. In particular, Shirley will look back on last year's Christmas -- to the final concert of her one-roomed school. This year, the school stands lonely. The laughter, the voices of the lilting Christmas choir, echo only faintly from the grey-stone walls. The snow in the schoolyard lies untrodden, the drifts creep up to the padlocked door -- another of Canada's one-roomed country schools has been abandoned. Yet, the special tide of joy that breaks over small rural schools at Christmas will continue to rise and fall in Canada. A full continent wide and just as tall, this country will always have its country schools. Living monuments, they will continue to remind Canadians that their fast-growing nation nurtured its ideals within similar walls; that under these roofs were passed on the rough, ready, but untarnishable ideals of the early settlers.